My Life in France Page 30

  Madame Vergé, a tiny and pretty woman, always made one feel welcome in the dining room, even on days when the chef was away. Ever energetic, she did the restaurant’s flowers, and ran a boutique in Mougins, where she sold antiques, tabletop decor, and Vergé’s gourmet products. Above the shop, Vergé had a second restaurant, L’Amandier, and a cooking school.

  The Moulin was a remarkable and thoroughly satisfying experience, and I asked Vergé how he had created such a place.

  For over a year, the chef said, he had looked and looked for just the right building in just the right town in just the right region to establish his restaurant. After nearly settling on a place in Aix-en-Provence, and spending several months there checking into the markets, transportation, and the kind of clientele he might expect, he had settled on Le Moulin de Mougins in 1968. For many years the building had been an olive-oil mill, before turning into what was known as un cinq a` sept (a disreputable inn, where men took their girlfriends from five to seven o’clock in the evening). Now, of course, the Vergés had completely renovated the building and furnished it tastefully. It had two large dining rooms inside, an ample bar, and a few rooms upstairs (no longer available by the hour!). The two terraces were wonderful places to eat, with widely spaced white tables covered with pink linen tablecloths and shaded by big umbrellas. Behind the restaurant were several very tall and very ancient olive trees. At the bottom of the hill was a thick dell, with willow trees and a jaunty little brook.

  For lunch we ate a lobster dish with a rich red-wine reduction. As we finished our coffee, Chef Vergé emerged from the kitchen and joined us for a glass of champagne. We introduced Jim, and then fell straight into food talk—the challenges of getting stars from Michelin (he had two and was headed for his third), the satisfactions and pitfalls of running a successful restaurant, the budgetary balance one must strike between staff, the kitchen equipment, the dining-room decoration, and so on. At one point I mentioned something that had been bothering me lately: “You know, Chef, over the past five years or so, I feel your famous French chickens, the poulets de Bresse, have not been as good as they used to be.”

  “Oui, it’s true,” he replied. “But I have found one little place in L’Allier that still produces good chickens.” As he toured us through the kitchen and introduced us to his smiling staff, Chef Vergé opened a door into a room-sized refrigerator, pulled out a fresh chicken from L’Allier, wrapped it in foil, and presented it to us. In a final act of kindness, he refused to allow us to pay the bill.

  With Chef Vergé at his restaurant

  Paul and I began to see Chef Vergé frequently, and the better I got to know him, the more I thought of him as a quintessential example of what a true chef should be. He was a living link to the greats of the past, the kind of dedicated cuisinier that had so inspired my love of France and its food. And, like Curnonsky, Vergé could not have come from anywhere but France.

  At five-thirty one evening, the chef and his wife joined us for cocktails on the terrace at La Pitchoune. We had brought a big Virginia ham from the States, and hoped they would be interested in that typically American fare. I had used a bit of it to make a jalousie au fromage et jambon de Virginie, a cheese-and-ham tart in puff pastry, which we served with a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1964 that Jim Beard had left for us.

  I had long ago decided not to go into the restaurant trade myself, because it required total commitment; furthermore, in a restaurant one is restricted to cooking what’s on the menu, and I preferred to experiment with many different dishes. Still, I always wondered, “What if I had . . . ?” I was curious to know how others had done it.

  “How did you become a restaurateur?” I asked Vergé.

  “Well, I was raised in the Allier Department with eight brothers and sisters. And for us, food was more important than anything else in our life,” he explained. His village was populated by typical country people—wine-growers, poultry farmers, cheesemakers, orchardists, fishermen, hunters, farmers, marchands de bétail, etc. There were no movies or television, or even any organized sports there, so eating and drinking (and sex, evidently) were their main diversions.

  “One of my grandfathers would wake up at four a.m., drink a cup of black coffee, and eat a whole roast chicken. Then he’d drink a second cup of coffee and eat a second chicken. Mind you, this was before breakfast, just to start the day right . . . and every day, too!”

  As he said this, I couldn’t help noticing that both Chef Roger and petite Denise had eaten two enormous helpings of jalousie each.

  Sundays were the day of real feasting chez Vergé, and all the generations of his family would gather. “My mother and aunt would rise early and spend the whole day cooking,” he said. “We’d start eating and drinking around ten o’clock Sunday morning, and we wouldn’t stop till about five.” At that point, the men would all troop out into the village, where they’d spend an hour or two in a café drinking apéritifs. The women washed up and began cooking dinner. “One of my uncles—he must have been seventy-five at the time—would get so drunk that he’d fall on the floor. When the eating and drinking started up again, my aunt would take a pair of scissors and cut a vein in his ear. By the time he’d bled enough, he’d get up and join right in with the rest of us!” Those epic Sunday dinners would go till midnight.

  “My uncle, he was a very robust man who lived to be eighty-four, you know. Everybody in town was big—red faces, strong people, hard workers. No one in my family ever heard of dieting. When I see some of the skinny little people in my restaurant pecking at their food like sparrows, I remember our village, where everyone ate heaps of sausages and pâtés and beef, and fish, and pheasants, and geese, and venison, and chicken. Not too many vegetables, of course. Mostly meat.”

  “So you learned to cook by watching your mother and aunt?”

  “They put a bench right up next to the stove for me to stand on, so I could see everything they were doing. Sometimes I would stir the pots, or hold a casserole, and of course I was tasting everything and listening to all their talk. So when I turned seventeen it was only natural that I should apprentice myself to a chef, and that’s how it all began.”

  III. HEARTBREAK

  IN AUGUST 1974, it was ninety-nine degrees and humid at La Pitchoune, and despite a cure of iced champagne poor Jim Beard was not faring well at all. But it was Paul who awoke at 4:00 a.m., coughing and choking with a gusher of a nosebleed. We stanched the flow, cleaned him up, and changed the sheets. The next morning, he was struck again. And just before lunch, he had a third nosebleed attack. This was not normal. We called the local doctor, who suggested putting ice on Paul’s nose, keeping his head elevated, and a few other basic remedies. The gushers stopped.

  We had never been to La Peetch in August before, but I was taking a break from telly work and meanwhile working on my latest book, From Julia Child’s Kitchen. That evening, we held a party on our terrace. There were nine guests, including the American cookbook-writer Richard Olney, a friend of Jim’s who had come over from his house in Solli`es-Toucas. The menu included oeufs en gelée, roast leg of lamb, haricots panachés (shell beans and string beans), and cheeses. For dessert, I unveiled a long-worked-on and finally-presented-to-the-public tarte au citron, which was marvelous. Paul served a succession of wonderful wines. His nose behaved.

  “Well, sure, you can call it a heart attack if you want to, but that phrase has many meanings,” the doctor said. “Why did it happen? We don’t really know. But we’ll give him every test we can think of.” It was October now, and we were back in Cambridge. Paul had suffered an infarction, a slowly developing heart condition.

  It wasn’t a roaring lion of a heart attack, such as you see in the movies, he said. Rather, it was a blockage of the arteries that had sneaked up on him “on tiny padded feet, like a field mouse.”

  Starting in about 1967, Paul recalled, he had felt very slight chest pains. They would disappear, and when his heart was tested, the doctor said: “Congratulations, you have the hear
t of an athlete in his thirties!” But after his nosebleeds at La Pitchoune in 1974, Paul started feeling the pains every day. He told our doctor in Boston about it that fall, and was immediately whisked into the Intensive Care Unit, where they detected two blocked blood vessels. Using veins from his legs, the doctors performed a new kind of operation, a bypass. After the surgery, Paul was trussed up with tubes like un pigeon désossé, and remained miserably bedridden for weeks. Furthermore, something about the operation (perhaps a lack of oxygen to the brain) had left him with a case of mental scrambles. He confused numbers and names, and his beautiful handwriting degenerated into scribbles.

  My poor husband, he who took such pride in lifting heavy suitcases and felling massive trees, hated to be so weak and confused. I hated it, too.

  I went to visit Paul at the hospital every day, sometimes twice a day. But I had much left to do on From Julia Child’s Kitchen—and thank heavens I did! As always, my work gave my life form, forced me to be productive, and helped me to keep a good balance. I was very lucky indeed. Without a challenging project like a cookbook to work on, I could well have gone cuckoo in those dark months of Paul’s hospitalization.

  THIS NEW BOOK had started out as a kind of French Chef Cookbook, Volume II, and was based on our seventy-two color-TV shows. But once I started in on writing it, the book turned into something quite different: a personal meander full of stories, recipe tangents, and summarizing comments about my twenty-five years in the kitchen. It was my most personal book, and the most difficult book I’ve ever written. Perhaps that’s why I’d come to consider it my favorite.

  In a way, From Julia Child’s Kitchen represented a great liberation for me. It included the lessons I’d learned from classical French cuisine, while putting my cooking know-how to work in new directions. With Judith Jones’s strong encouragement, I branched into Indian curries, New England chowders, Belgian cookies, and tinkered with new gadgets like the microwave oven. As was my habit, I delved into the proper hard-boiling of eggs and the various ways to soufflé those tricky busters, potatoes.

  My hope was that readers would use From Julia Child’s Kitchen as if it were a private cooking school. I tried to structure each recipe as a class. And the great lesson embedded in the book is that no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing. This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook—try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!

  Epilogue

  FIN

  PAUL ALWAYS FELT that closing up La Pitchoune after a stay was “a symbolic death.” But that seemed awfully gloomy to me. I didn’t think of closing our house for a few months as a “death” at all. To me, life moves forward. Leaving La Peetch now just meant that there would be a good reason to come back the next time. And go back we all did, year after year.

  In 1976, Jean and Simca gave up their little apartment in Neuilly, outside of Paris, and moved down to Le Mas Vieux full-time. Every summer she conducted cooking classes there, mostly for Americans, who loved her accessible and genuinely French recipes. And in ensuing years both she and Louisette would write two recipe books apiece.

  Then came a period when our intimate friends and family began to slip off into the Great Blue Yonder. Charlie and Freddie died of heart attacks. Jim Beard died in 1985, at age eighty-one. Jean Fischbacher died the following year, at age seventy-nine. Simca, living alone in Le Mas Vieux, refused to put herself into a retirement home or to hire a nurse. I worried about ma belle soeur, but, as always, she was determined to do things her own way.

  “I do often think of we childless ones, with no offspring to lean on,” I wrote Simca. “Avis, for instance, who evidently has only a year or so to live with her internal cancer, has her grandchildren to take her shopping, etc. Eh bien, we shall take care of ourselves . . . which we do very well. But I realize at our time of life the great difference between ourselves and those who have produced!” There were melancholy moments when I wished I had a daughter of my own to share things with.

  But we cooks are a hardy lot: Escoffier survived to be eighty-nine, after all, and my old chef Max Bugnard lived to be ninety-six. Perhaps Simca and I would make it to eighty-five, or even ninety.

  Simca was eighty-seven years old in June 1991, when she fell in her bedroom at Le Mas Vieux and caught a chill, which led to a terrible pneumonia. Although she held on for another six months through force of will, La Super-Française finally succumbed that December. “We have lost a remarkable person who was a fond and generous sister to me,” I wrote with a heavy heart.

  Paul never fully recovered from the effects of his heart troubles, and slowly became un vieillard. In 1989, he suffered a series of strokes, which, on top of prostate problems, made travel an ordeal. He was brave about it, but the aging process was rotten. It no longer made sense for him to get up at 5:00 a.m. so that I could do cooking demonstrations and TV shows in places like New York and Washington, D.C. I sharply cut back my work and travel schedule.

  And I came to a decision. Without Paul to share the house with, or my grande chérie Simca, or all of our other favorite friends and family, it had come time to relinquish La Pitchoune.

  People seemed surprised when I told them that it wasn’t an especially difficult or emotional decision. But I have never been very sentimental. La Pitchoune was a special place, but the heart had gone out of it for me now. It was the people I shared it with, more than the physical property, that I would miss.

  Besides, Provence was no longer the quiet refuge we had all loved. It had become hideously expensive (a head of lettuce cost twice as much in Cannes as in Cambridge), and the coastline was more jammed than ever. Houses were multiplying on the hillsides, and the winding country roads were clogged with streams of cars and enormous trucks. Our little village of Plascassier, which had always had a butcher, baker, vegetable shops, and electrician, now had no little businesses left at all; everyone went to the big supermarket down the hill. As Paul had accurately predicted years earlier, the place was turning into southern California. And that I could walk away from sans regret.

  IN JUNE 1992, Dort’s daughter Phila, her husband, and baby boy joined me for a final, month-long stay at La Peetch. The house was filled with familiar smells and memories, but, rather than dwell on them too much, I preferred to keep busy. Friends dropped by; I played a round of golf (my favorite game); we took long walks, marketed, and ate very well in Cannes and Nice and Grasse. There was little water pressure at the house, and I had to take sponge baths the whole time, but one gets used to that. Every night I would set the alarm for 2:00 a.m. so that I could call Paul, who was now ninety years old and living in a nursing home outside of Boston.

  In a leisurely way, Phila and I packed up my batterie de cuisine, Paul’s paintings and photographs, and our glassware from Biot. We left Simca’s furniture and tidied up all the legal and financial loose ends, in order to return the house to Jean’s family—just as Paul and I had promised we would nearly thirty years earlier.

  As the month drew to a close, I was feeling upbeat, and was surprised when Phila began to cry. I asked her what was wrong. “Oh, I’m all stirred up because this is the last time we will be here like this,” she said.

  “That’s true,” I replied. “But I will always have such wonderful memories of the Peetch.”

  “But aren’t you going to miss it?”

  I shrugged, and said: “I’ve always felt that when I’m done with something I just walk away from it—fin!”

  On our last day at La Pitchoune, we invited a group of friends over for dinner. I lit a match and turned on the four-burner cuisinière; the stove made a dramatic pouf! noise when the gas lit, which scared everyone but made me smile. Then I cooked a boeuf en daube à la provençale, a splendid braised pot roast with wine, tomatoes, and herbes de Provence. Yum! It was a jolly meal indeed, and a fitting way to close the curtain.

  Just before going to bed that night, I stood on the terrace in the dappled shadows of the mulberry tree. A pale mo
on hung in the sky over the red-tiled roof. A cool breeze brushed my face and rustled the trees on the hillside across the valley. I inhaled the sweet scent of flowers, listened to the nightingale-and-frog chorus, and felt the familiar rough stones under my bare feet. What a lovely place.

  The next morning, it was a classic Provençal day—sunny and cool, with a sharp blue sky. After breakfast, I handed the keys to La Pitchoune over to Jean’s sister. Then we climbed into the car and bumped down the dusty, rutted driveway for the very last time.

  I TRIED TO HOLD on to my impressions, but it was hopeless, as if I were trying to hold on to a dream. No matter. France was my spiritual homeland: it had become part of me, and I a part of it, and so it has remained ever since. Now I was moving forward again, into new experiences, in new places, with new people. There was still so much to learn and do—articles and books to write, perhaps another TV show or two to try. I wanted to go lobster-fishing in Maine, visit a Chicago slaughterhouse, teach kids how to cook. I viewed our recipes as a sacred trust, a set of rules about the right way and wrong way to approach food, and I felt a duty to pass this knowledge on. In short, my appetite had not diminished!

  In Paris in the 1950s, I had the supreme good fortune to study with a remarkably able group of chefs. From them I learned why good French food is an art, and why it makes such sublime eating: nothing is too much trouble if it turns out the way it should. Good results require that one take time and care. If one doesn’t use the freshest ingredients or read the whole recipe before starting, and if one rushes through the cooking, the result will be an inferior taste and texture—a gummy beef Wellington, say. But a careful approach will result in a magnificent burst of flavor, a thoroughly satisfying meal, perhaps even a life-changing experience.